Friday links! Combust in a fiery pillar of rage edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links 4 Comments

Yes, I have. Thank you.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: democracy doesn’t work. Okay, democracy totally works, but it works on the responsible conduct of an informed citizenry. I don’t know if our current citizenry is less informed and responsible than that of, say, 1893, or if I’m just alive and therefore capable of experiencing blinding, indignant anger only now. But what. The fuck. Is wrong with everybody? Maybe it’s because a loose national organization of the proudly ignorant just held a rally to congratulate themselves on being Americans. Maybe it’s because I spent yesterday watching my 45 year-old neighbor get drunk and burn his hand with fireworks, again. Or maybe it’s just because I have the internet. This Friday’s link roundup will propel you into the weekend on a jet of pure, baffled rage. It’s probably best not to think about from whence such a jet would emanate, though. Gross.

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Friday links! Sugaring the pill edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links 0 Comment

As the chick who does it with Dracula in Dracula once said,* sometimes you have to take the good with the bad. Today is Friday, and that’s good. The American economy collapsed like two years ago and now the only people with jobs are professional assholes arguing about whom to blame for said economy and each other, plus terrorism, and that’s bad. It’s a continuum, see, and we’re all just swept up in it, bobbing up and down like boats, albeit not both up and down simultaneously as would better fit my point. Maybe let’s go back to the pill metaphor. For this week’s link roundup, we have some important stuff that’s so horribly depressing I can barely stand to think about it. We also have Kanye and a fail video, by way of sugar. Won’t you have a swallow with me?

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Friday links! Point-counterpoint edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links 0 Comment

In this era of internet journalism and, I dunno, social networking and stuff, it’s easy to just get one side of a story. Were it not for my ironic readings of Tea Party Nation newsletters, Ross “Defense of Racism” Douthat and World Net Daily, my understanding of world events would be entirely dictated by the New York Times and Andrew Sullivan. That’s hardly a balanced scale, and I suspect that my weighing of certain issues has been less than accurate as a result. But say what you will about the internet—seriously, say whatever the hell you want—a little digging will usually give you the mirror image of what you just learned. This Friday’s link roundup is chock full of instances when the internet refutes itself, exposing the stupidity of the self-published and smugly answering the rhetorical questions of the stupid. We’ve also got Juggalos so, you know, buckle up.

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Friday links! Impending vacation edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links, Uncategorized 1 Comment

Participants in the Appleseed Project learn to shoot a man-sized target at 500 yards. Seriously.

Combat! blog is just one Friday link roundup away from its weeklong vacation, and this is it. There will be no Combat! blog next week, because my urbanized ass is going camping in the wilds of, um, New Hampshire. Obviously this period of discombatery will be difficult for all five of us, so today’s link roundup is designed to give you as much to think about for the next week as possible. By “think about” I mean “ponder nervously while you fail to sleep.” It’s the gift that keeps on giving: the gift of fear, and it’s all over American politics this week. Whether it’s guiding our decisions or just coalescing around them years after the fact, absolute scared-shitlessness is the unifying principle of apparently everything of note in contemporary culture. Won’t you catch a chill with me?

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Friday links! Hurriedly packing things into boxes edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links 1 Comment

It’s 9am in Washington, DC, and I am looking at a lot of boxes next to things that should be in boxes. Combat! blog has temporarily relocated to the east coast to A) help my brother move and B) finally eat some good Mexican food again, and boy, are we busy. Don’t worry, though—there’s always time for a Friday link roundup. There’s just not time to make it good. This week, Combat! blog presents links that we found in our Write About It Later file just before we dismantled a coffee table. Will it prepare you for a weekend spent doing things at the last minute and therefore pausing to consider what, in a temporal universe governed by random subatomic interactions, a plan even is? Sure—why not?

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